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Tuesday, 2 August 2016

Another fraud scandal at a Tory flagship free school

In March 2016, just days after the (now departed) Tory education secretary Nicky Morgan announced her plan to force privatise every single school in England it was revealed that one of the flagship Tory academy chains was riddled with financial mismanagement and outright fraud. The outrageous scamming at the Perry Beeches academy chain in Birmingham should have served as a dire warning about the future of the English education system under Tory rule. In their haste to carve up the education system and distribute it (for free) to their private sector mates, the Tories have created an unaccountable free-for-all for some of the most greedy and unscrupulous people in society (including several millionaire Tory donors) to pilfer taxpayer funded education budgets to line their own pockets.

In a way it's astonishing that the staff at the school will likely go to jail for fraudulently pilfering a few tens of thousands of pounds of public money into their own bank accounts, while the Tory party bigwig who will continue siphoning almost £300,000 per year out of kids' education budgets for the next 15 years will get away with it scot free.

The scandals at the Perry Beeches academy chain and the Kings Science Academy are clearly just the tip of the iceberg in an unaccountable and increasingly fragmented education system.

Of course all of these people who are busy raiding six figure salaries, plus expenses, plus gold plated pension contributions out of our childrens' education budgets will have some internal justification monologue for what they're doing. They'll sleep like babies at night without the faintest concern for the fact that the Bentley in the drive of their new mansion and their luxury holiday at the Taj Lake Palace have come as a direct consequence of raiding the taxpayer funded education budgets intended to provide a decent level of education to thousands of kids.

The greedy topslicing of education budgets and the numerous cases of outright fraud demonstrate that the Tory ideological agenda of privatising the state education system is an absolute disaster for all but the lucky few who get to milk the cash cow, but somehow only a small minority of people seem even remotely concerned about it.

I guess most people are just so complacent and apathetic that they think it's perfectly fine and natural that the Tories have been allowing some of the most unscrupulous people in society (including millionaire Tory donors and outright criminals) to raid taxpayer funded education budgets for their own personal enrichment. Perhaps most people just think that outrageous scamming like this is just the natural order of things and just shrug their shoulders about it before going off to rote learn tropes like "Theresa May is a safe pair of hands" from their favourite tax-dodging billionaire sociopath owned propaganda rag.

What we can doThe Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn opposes the ongoing Tory privatisation of the English education system and proposes to undo the damage by introducing a National Education Service to oversee the education system.